Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness

by Robert Aquinas McNally

Cast Out of Eden explores John Muir’s role in the dispossession of Native Americans from U.S. wild lands and points a way toward reconciliation.

Genres: Biography, History

309 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2024

Reviews

[Rodman Marquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished this one. Another story about California and its water struggles, land struggles and poor treatment of American Indians. The racist sentiment was probably normal for the time but it is presented as extreme in light of where we are today. Muir was normal for time but extremely racist by contemporary standards...shocking in some cases. More of a very high 3 star read but I bumped it to 4 considering how much I learned.

[Matthew Kerns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A thought-provoking masterpiece. Following the life and achievements of John Muir, ‘Father of the National Parks,’ McNally masterfully shows how one of America’s greatest achievements—the preservation of our wildest places—is indelibly tied to one of our most abject failures—the treatment of the Native Americans who lived there.”

"Cast Out of Eden" is a monumental work by Robert Aquinas McNally that is as breathtaking in its scope as it is in its depth of insight. McNally's profound exploration of John Muir's life, particularly his complex relationship with America's wilderness and the Indigenous peoples, presents a narrative that is as enlightening as it is heartrending.

Unlike previous biographies of Muir that often veered into hagiography, "Cast Out of Eden" offers a nuanced and critical perspective. While acknowledging Muir's pivotal contributions to the conservation of America's natural landscapes, McNally courageously delves into the more problematic facets of his legacy. The book addresses the overlooked consequences of Muir's environmental crusades, particularly the disregard for the rights and humanity of Native American communities whose displacement was rationalized by the very initiatives Muir championed. This approach provides a more balanced understanding of Muir's impact on America's wilderness preservation efforts, contrasted with the experiences of the Native American men, women, and children who had lived in the vast unspoiled wilderness Muir so revered.

"Cast Out of Eden" is a thought-provoking masterpiece that manages to capture the essence of one of America's greatest achievements — the preservation of its wild lands — while also laying bare the moral costs of this endeavor. McNally masterfully shows how the sanctification of wilderness areas is indelibly tied to the dispossession and suffering of the Indigenous peoples who lived in harmony with these lands for millennia.

Reading this book before attending the Western Writers of America conference in Rapid City, South Dakota, particularly enhanced my appreciation for McNally's narrative mastery. Driving through the Badlands, the Black Hills, and crossing the Pine Ridge Reservation, I found myself deeply contemplating the complex layers of beauty and tragedy that comprise our national heritage. McNally's lyrical narrative voice was a guiding light through this introspective journey, helping me to grapple with the uncomfortable truths about the lands we cherish and the histories we must reckon with.

"Cast Out of Eden" offers an unflinching look at Muir's vision of wilderness that excluded the very people who had cultivated these landscapes for centuries. McNally does not merely present a critique but invites us to imagine a future where America's wild spaces are inclusive, where the legacy of conservation is one of healing and justice for all its peoples.

In closing, Robert Aquinas McNally's "Cast Out of Eden" is more than just a biography; it is a clarion call to acknowledge the juxtaposed triumphs and tragedies of our past, to understand the present, and to strive for a more equitable future. It is a must-read for anyone who cares deeply about the natural world and the complex, often painful history that has shaped our relationship with it and the people who inhabited it.

[Dave Holt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Aquinas McNally’s book, Cast Out of Eden, portrays John Muir as what I’d call a single-eyed visionary intent on preserving wilderness without including its original inhabitants, the American Indians. Although he held an “unflattering opinion of Native Americans,” (194) he admired the Tlingit tribe of Alaska as an exception, admired their families, how children were raised. “In all my travels, I never heard a cross fault-finding word… loving kindness bestowed on the little ones made the house glow.” (101) Perhaps most admirable of all traits, they were “open to Christian salvation.” Muir kept his low opinion of other tribal peoples, “lowly, brutish, savage and dirty.” (194) He seemed especially, even neurotically in my opinion, obsessed with the dirtiness, disregarding perhaps how they lacked easy access to good Scottish plumbing and that these good superior Anglo-Saxon races were busy polluting the natural waterways.
In all this, he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher-poet, who “modeled a philosophically respectable white supremacy,” and subscribed to a then widespread “American white race theory,” although by 1844 he abhorred slavery and spoke out in support of abolition. True Americans in Emerson’s view were Saxon-Norse and acquired, through English heritage, the Caucasian qualities of “forward energy, manly violence, and physical beauty. (62)” Many other races including Irish, African-American, Chinese, cannot “occupy any very high place in the human family.” (63)
Such portraits of iconic culture heroes like Muir and Emerson having feet of clay are true shockers. I haven’t encountered these revelations elsewhere. Considering the white-dominated culture and racist atmosphere of the 19th century, and how American Indian tribes suffered genocide and theft of their lands as a result, I could say I’m not really surprised. Although I’ve chosen to focus on these topics, you will find many other adventures, interesting stories, and yarns that you can enjoy in McNally’s excellent and significant book. It’s a great read!

[Bargain Sleuth Book Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many thanks to NetGalley and the University of Nebraska Press for the digital ARC of this book. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I've read several biographies about John Muir and have seen Ken Burns National Park documentary series more times than I can count. Most of the depictions of Muir have been of a wise sage who realized before most people the need to protect the lands of the American west from being overrun. But who was the protection for? The well-to-do Eastern Protestants who came out to vacation in "untamed land"? As with most biographies written more than a decade ago, very little attention is given to the indigenous people who lived on the very land that the United States government protected by creating national parks. This book seeks to rectify that fact.

There's a well-known Muir quote that goes something like this "Nothing truly wild is unclean." However, when you read the whole quote, it's racist AF. The sentence preceding that famous quote is "The worst thing about the American Indian is their uncleanliness." And that's just one of the fun quotes the author unearthed. That said, however much one wants to condemn Muir for his beliefs, in the context of the times, it was not an unusual thought for a white, educated, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

It's important to note that this book isn't just a deep dive into John Muir and his dismissal of any non-white person he came across. Rather, it's a look at the times in which Muir lived, the other important decision-makers when it came to the national park system and transcontinental railroad. The book points out repeatedly that when Muir or others encountered Chinese workers of Indigenous people, they are merely mentioned in passing. It is rare that an actual name is used in Muir's writings unless it's a white person.

I do think that at times the point of the book is stretched a little bit, as after Muir's death the book continues on to mark other notable screwing-over of Indigenous People up until the present-day. However, I do think on the whole, this book is a great start in a more nuanced look at Muir and others like him, and how they shouldn't be held so high up on the pedestal.

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[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page numbers are missing in the Goodreads entry, but for those wondering, the book is 328 pages long.

This book might be important. Like a keystone block in building an arch supporting our understanding of history. A complete history that isn't as pretty as mainstream America accepts. Hyperbole! Perhaps. But I think not.

I appreciate this unexpected, enlightening and eye opening -- is exposé too strong? -- revisit of John Muir and the birth of wilderness and natural park conservation. I've held Muir high among my "heroes" without consideration of what the costs were for creating our magnificent park/wilderness legacy. I've still very glad he was such a strong advocate for it. But I'm more glad through this well researched book (albeit with an agenda) to learn about the costs, the ethnic bias, the sexism, the down right racism.

I also held the Disciples of Christ in higher regard than the author, and appreciate the footnotes supporting his conclusions about their stance on a number of issues. He succeeded in moving them to stand in lower personal regard historically. I wonder how different his life might have been had he been raised Quaker or some other outcast Christian sect.

Could we have achieved preservation of these lands without genocide? I think so. Had Muir been more open to difference, like being raised Quaker or Presbyterian, perhaps our national parks would have been incorporated into larger Tribal Nation reservations.

The author has a mission and it's drilled home with every chapter. It seems well researched, though. So those who want to continue to hold Muir up on a pedestal will need to make room for all of the baggage he carried from being a racist, sexist, elitist, judgemental white European male. The ramifications of his support of genocide, however, are still felt. Are, dare I use the loaded word, reparations warranted? The author explores the issue in the closing chapters.

This is a hard hitting book, but supported with ample documentation. Creation of our parks meant, in the minds of its advocates first cleansing it of the people who had lived within the lands for generations. In hindsight we can ask was that approach necessary? Hard to conclude in the affirmative. It could have been done better. People didn't need to die. Of course few, if any of them died to protect the land. It was racist greed or ignorance that seemed to drive extermination.

Thank god for the parks though! Just as one is forced to separate art from the artist and literature from the writer, good deeds done by bad people are still good deeds. I will continue to hold up the good deeds Muir did for their globally important value, without feeling as much need to raise all of the man at the same time. The conservation/preservation acts and natural ethics he advocated can stand alone.

The generosity of NetGalley allowed me the opportunity to read this well researched, heavily footnoted book before publication. I encourage others with entrenched perspectives with a pristine history of the birth of U.S. conservation/preservation to visit this book to explore their own need for balance -- and measuring what matters most (the person or the acts they accomplished). I learned a lot from the book and appreciate the grounding it provided. I am inclined to buy it once published for deeper personal exploration.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cast Out of Eden is a biography of John Muir. If you are unfamiliar with Muir, he invented the outdoors in 1890. Put a pin in that joke, but the point is that he is well-enough established a historical figure that I do not feel the need to elaborate much here.

I predict that the reviews of this book will look like a snapshot of the culture war, with words like 'problematic' and 'woke mob' getting tossed about. I am a little more in the middle as regards this book. I know, I know, everyone claims that, but in essence I think that the author's thesis is both correct and relevant, but that the own goals in the text hurt the immediacy of the message.

The twist here is that Muir is beloved on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left he is seen as a landmark environmentalist. On the right, Muir is a small-e evangelical and the copywriter of American Muscular Christianity (while he would not identify himself with either).

But he sure wrote a lot of racist things. It is one thing to read Nothing truly wild is unclean," (with 104 likes on this website as of the writing of this) and realize that the sentence preceding it is "The worst thing about [the American Indian] is their uncleanliness." This is not complaining about the past. It is part of his philosophy of the wilderness and the importance of the outdoors, as he viewed a white man's burden that attached to the proper stewardship of wild places, and that Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the only people with sufficient reservation to be conservationists. Which they were God-sent to do, for the benefit of all the people's of the world.

The sort of racism he displays tends to be altogether predictable in its sentiment, though as noted above his fixation on cleanliness as relates to the American Indian feels idiosyncratic and mysophobic. It is tempting to take this and play amateur Freudian and try and come up with an explanation based on Muir's biography, but if I did, I would be engaging in one of the persisting weaknesses of the book, and when it gets too hit piece. There are a lot of negative inferences. All are supportable, but few are warranted. For instance, at one point the author refers to Muir's nickname among some of the Alaskan natives as a joke, rather than an honor This is not baseless, but neither is it clear. (And I do find it interesting that the cites on it include the culture critic's column [as a culture critic, I warn you never to trust culture critics] but not the response by the linguist of the tribe, whose take was equivocal.) The author sells on the worst possible choices.

At points, this winds up obfuscating the more interesting stores of Muir. In the above story, Muir is much more accepting and laudatory of the Alaskan Natives than he is of other indigenous groups. Similarly, Muir's views on the ownership of cultural property seem to vary, sometimes upset by stealing or destroying of items like grave goods, and sometimes destroying them himself with willful abandon. He has friendships, particularly with eugenicists (a lot of eugenicists. So many, many eugenicists) but his own writing does not seem to reflect that, and might even contradict it. Why were some big shot tourists okay and not others whom he befriended? How does someone who was engineering tyro end up the United State's premier environmentalist?

Muir is human, and not bound to consistency in his behaviors, so it may be that such questions are unanswerable. Even if they are, this biography, with its particular inflection, may not be the right place to answer them. But in that it feels like they are often answered in a way as to structure a sort of smear to Muir's character, which feels like bad faith.

Functionally, I think that this is okay. Muir has much more hagiography by volume. But I worry that it creates an unnecessary distraction from the important thesis of the book.

We return to the pin. It is a joke to say that Muir invented the outdoors, as if the outdoors was something he started in his garage and now is listed on the NASDAQ. It is not a joke to say that Muir invented the idea of the outdoors, that Muir impressed a concept upon the space of America that we now accept as the outdoors, and that concept is so foundational to how we think about space in the nation that it is impossible to see.

Muir's view was dualist: there is a sacred wild that reflects the mind of God and a profane civil that reflects the degeneracy of man. But the author is here to show how Muir's wild was nothing of the sort. Humans had been living in the Americas for millennia. The landscape was not natural, but built to their particular lifestyle. Pretending it was natural was an element of settler colonialism that allowed, well, settler colonialism at all, because it treats the whole of the land as fundamentally wild and unclaimed as opposed to all claimed in a network of national identity that is unrecognized and disrespected.

And here, the author is on point to establish that Muir was a knowing participant in this sort of steps to genocide. This is unlike his acceptance of a more ambient racism, and the author points out advocates like C.E. Kelsey who, while still racist in the abstract, recognized the way that enforcing wild spaces meant denying the property rights of American Indians, and wanted a blended approach. I am a little unsure that it is truly better, it's a little too Hobbs vs. Rousseau. But the idea that Muir took things in the wrong way once you get past the pretty words is indelible because of his own words on the topic and his treatment of American Indians as a sort of inconvenient fact.

I think that acknowledging this is very important for policy debates today, with ramifications about how we think about cities and land and personal determination. And like Muir's bicameral appeal, it presents an equally unifying negative one, disabusing the world of both the I got mine Libertarian and the haughty central planner. And it is unique to see how we can point to one thing and say this is the origin story, here is where the myth is not just generally asserted but codified. The idea that we can isolate and speak truth about such things is important for all manner of addressing what can be changed in political life. I just hope that the need to take all the easy buckets does not cause readers to miss that.

My thanks to the author, Robert Aquinas McNally, and to the publisher, University of Nebraska Press, for making the ARC available to me.

[AlliD · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've spent a good deal of time researching John Muir and one of his mentors, the botanist Jeanne Carre, for a project I had in mind. What stopped me was the realization that my concept of "Nature" had been warped by the philosophical legacy of these 19th Century conservationists. I began to understand that my concepts of "the Environment" were deeply flawed and limited. The colonial, racist, and fetishization of the so-called "wilds" was something that took me some time to untangle in my own understanding of the world. Also implicit in my problems with this narrative and biases was the centralized role of "the hero's journey" and how the myths and celebrity of Muir as an iconic figure are simplified into an archetype that does not ring true with what else we can find in the historical record-- if we bother to look closely.

Robert Aquinas McNally diligently does that work and exposes in detail the injustices delivered on the indigenous peoples caught in the current of the American delusion about "God's sanctuary." McNally's contribution is an examination of Muir's racist attitudes towards the people who called the National Parks home for millennia before they were forced off the land.

While I am still grateful that these imperfect humans worked to create any kind of conservation movement against the brutal assault of industrialization, we have so much farther to go to see ecological justice prevail in our shared habitats.

[Patrick Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not Great.
Comes across as a tally sheet accounting and arm chair psycho-analysis of the failings of John Muir, rather than a narrative about his life and works.
Race and victums are the primary focus at every turn vs. a John Muir lifes work analysis. This purpose makes reading it slow going as judgements are pronounced. It can't make up it's mind about how much of Muir's life and work to : erase, celebrate, condem, and/or laud. (ASIDE: the Sierra Club has approached their Muir legacy with this same lens, so much so that Muir's "sins" vs. their environmental advocacy mission has become an all consuming focus.) Zealots always want: 'pure' advocates, and clear black and white, good and bad guys to grind their own particular axe on. It makes good sermons, but intermidable non-fiction books.